Blink of the Eyes
by Roving Kite
Summary: Quick and random ficlet. Involves the younger data pair constructing and flying kites, as well as Renji thinking too much.


**Blink of the Eyes**

o

Your kite is a pale golden brown, the color of a fresh sheet of canvas stretched over an easel. It was planned in one afternoon and built in another – deliberately, meticulously, the same way you did anything else.

You are not sure what color to call Sadaharu's kite, only because it has so many, and in equal proportions. Strictly speaking, it is a slightly oblate rectangular box, with two trailing strands of white plastic that are covered with an assortment of objects acting as weights. He must have been making last-minute modifications to it just before you arrived at the river's edge, for the grass about his feet is littered with craft supplies and notebooks, enough that you're reminded of a ridiculously colorful fairy circle.

You are both silent with concentration as a result of the challenge that was actually never proposed aloud by either of you (to see, naturally, who could get their kite to go the highest). You wish that you were not, because Sadaharu chattering away in your ear, at least, would have been in many ways an anchor to the here and now. It is one thing to know that you're standing at the edge of a grassy riverbank with the one person who knows you inside and out, but another to really register each blast of wind, each second passed and lost, and everything else that screams _this is real_.

Without the chatter, with the soft sunlight as its only distraction, your mind will tend to wander. And then you might, after all, just as well be standing in the kitchen as you had that morning, as your mother had broken the news with what you felt to be all the tact of a dropped anvil. Even the howling wind, if you listen to it too much, will make you think of open car windows – four cool, black steel edges, and the act of watching all that is familiar recede through them.

Sadaharu glances skyward with nothing but the utmost concentration. _His_ judgment, at least, is perfectly intact, and he notes the wind shifting abruptly to the east 3.4 seconds before it actually does. Both your kites swivel slowly in an arc, until they are no longer aligned with the riverbank where you are standing, but hovering above the river itself, silhouetted against a sky of the clearest windy blue.

To your slight chagrin it is Sadaharu's kite, despite all its last-minute modifications and mismatched colors, that is rising the more steadily. Your golden-brown one, meanwhile, makes periodic attempts to shear off at an angle, and these make themselves felt as sharp, insistent jerks down the length of string. Sadaharu, finally noting this, makes a noise that you could have interpreted either as sympathy or bemusement.

You look at him standing there – in sharp, clashing colors, with a minor windstorm of construction paper and ribbon at his feet – and feel a pang of something that you doubt either of you could strip down to its analytical components. It is a little like envy, a little like unfairness.

Next to him, you feel sluggish, suspended. As if you have become the colorless river water, languid in its banks, crystal blue only when it reflects the sky. He rattles off another piece of information, and you don't catch it, but only because the words are lost in the wind that is again howling _Kanagawa, Kanagawa_ in your ear.

It is more than a little bit disconcerting, and you would never admit it to him – but for the first time that you can remember, you simply can't _think_.

The string in your hand gives a particularly insistent tug, and you wonder whether there will be a time, a handful of years from now, when you could look up at a similar sky and think only of things that are placid, detached – the wind currents, perhaps. You could certainly trace the line of invisible convection cells, shifting across the river and toward the tall buildings on the far bank.

And maybe you would conclude that – just like the last lingering wisps of cloud on the horizon – all that soared up into the clear blue expanse must inevitably sink, down again, to the city below. And then, in that hypothetical future, you might even manage to register only calm, bask instead in the beauty of that very inevitability.

But, for today, you are restless, unwary, and ten years old. Not yet above hoping that by thinking against the data hard enough, long enough, you could sooner or later get it to disappear entirely.

You pick up the pair of scissors from the pile of debris on the ground, and cut the string of your kite clean through.

Sadaharu's glasses have slid down the bridge of his nose, and his eyes are wide and green and disbelieving with shock. But you laugh, and hear yourself say, _I win_.

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o

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**A.N. **Technically the first PoT fic I've ever written, and I think that I'll always be very fond of it. :D


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